What about snake swords…?

The other day I finally got around to watching The Road Warrior. It was time, given the maledictions of my peers. Make no mistake – the censures were meet and just. Every SFF buff should watch the second installment of the Mad Max series.

I won’t do a deep dive here, as I’m almost 40 years late to the party, but a few notes:

2. Great mix of low and high tech and interesting flavor choices. Gun ammo seems to be a rare and valuable commodity, so some firearms but not a ton. Flamethrowers, crossbows, gyrocopters? Yessssss.

3. Characterization wasn’t very strong, but it didn’t need to be. The main villain was kinda cool and mysterious. The sidekick was amusing. The townsfolk included a hot Amazonian chick. Mad Max was Mad Max (though his departure directly through the bad guys’ camp was a head-scratchingly dumb-ass move; would a survivor like him really do something so brazen and foolish?). The world building makes up for this.

There were a lot of cool fights and much violence, but my favorite element may have been the weaponization of snakes by the gyrocopter pilot dude. When I reflected upon this brilliance, a couple of Twitter friendlies pointed out that it was also done by Thulsa Doom.

True! I almost forgot about that!

Two things, though. In Mad Max, Gyro uses the snakes as projectiles at one point, tossing them from above onto baddies in punked-out roadsters. This is a bit different from Thusla Doom’s use – shooting them like arrows. If we had to give points here, I’d award them to Doom for style.

So far as precedent, though, it either goes to Mad Max or ends up a wash. Conanthe Barbarian was released in May of 1982. The Road Warrior came to the US a few days later in the same year, but was released in Australia in 1982. So really Mad Max did it very slightly earlier.